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But under the guidance of news president Andrew Lack (a former documentary and magazine-show producer at CBS News who took over NBC's news division in 1993), the NBC Nightly News has had a remarkable makeover: fewer stories per night, moving the broadcast closer to a magazine-show approach; less traditional news from Washington and more on user-friendly topics like health, the family and consumer issues; and a jazzier format, with lots of catchy labels for continuing segments. The "Fleecing of America" is the umbrella title for stories on government waste and taxpayer ripoffs. "In Their Own Words" gives newsmakers a chance to talk uninterrupted for a minute or more. "NBC News on Line" is, well, a hip title for what seems to be nothing more than a brief look at other stories. (Yet another continuing segment debuts this week: "The Family," exploring subjects like divorce and fatherhood.) Brokaw now stands, rather than sits, in front of a very '90s video wall. And at the end of the show, his face--presto!--appears on a huge video screen overlooking New York City's Times Square.
It's a triumph of packaging, but does the NBC Nightly News still deliver the nightly news? It depends on what kind of news you're looking for. According to the Tyndall Report, a newsletter that monitors the three evening newscasts, NBC spent more time last year than either ABC or CBS on such high-impact stories as the ValuJet crash and the Simpson trial and far less on Bob Dole's campaign and the Whitewater investigation. In foreign news, the numbers were especially striking: NBC spent only 49 minutes all year on the strife in Bosnia, in contrast to 117 on ABC and 134 on CBS. NBC stories are more likely to go for the gut and the pop-cultural hot button. A report last week on daydreams (part of a mushy weeklong series called "Sleepless in America") illustrated its thesis with clips from the movie Wayne's World. On another recent newscast, the second story of the night was a blatantly tearjerking excerpt--"In Their Own Words"--from the press conference of the mother of a teenage girl slain on the same day as Ennis Cosby.
NBC News executives fervently defend their show against charges that it has gone soft and tabloid. "Don't make us the antichrist," joked Brokaw, relaxing in a black cardigan sweater last Monday afternoon in his Rockefeller Center office. It was a slow news day, and with nothing of substance coming out of the National Governors' Association conference, the program was planning to lead, once again, with the Simpson trial. "We're not happy about it," said Brokaw. "You don't have a lot of people here saying, 'Let's do O.J.'" Indeed, while NBC went overboard with Simpson coverage during his criminal trial, it has been considerably more restrained during the civil proceedings.
"The mission of the program remains identical," says Lack, who takes a hands-on role in the Nightly News, consulting on each day's story lineup. "That is to bring the best execution journalistically of the most important news of the day. I don't think our program is better than World News Tonight or the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. But we've made a conscious effort to produce a somewhat different program from the ones they do." It's a more "populist" approach, he concedes, which eschews Washington "process" stories--subcommittee hearings, presidential speeches--in favor of "the real news in people's lives."